Consider the tennis ball. Green. Fuzzy. Cute. But there are 300 million of them manufactured worldwide each year (with over 125 million used in the US). They are only used for a short time, and then tons of balls are discarded into landfills each year. In those quantities, these green tennis balls are in fact, not so cute, and not so green.

A sustainability project called Project Green Ball has focused on this particular area and is doing something about it.

Project Green Ball is devoted to finding innovative means to recycle used tennis balls and we’ve linked to their site to help them make the project a success.

They have already partnered with a wide variety of organizations to find new uses for the tennis balls, as-is, or processed in some way.

We particularly like the idea of their use in construction. See the picture below to learn how they’re potentially useable in construction of hurricane-prone areas, to provide more elasticity to walls, while preserving structural integrity but with less weight. The idea is that in areas with high winds or which are tornado or hurricane prone that the balls will provide a cost effective means to increase the elasticity of the walls without sacrificing strength.

Click on the photo to be brought to the Project Green Ball section covering use of tennis balls in construction.

But not all of the ideas involve corporations. You, individually can make (excuse the pun) a racquet here.

Here (from the site) are some of their ideas in which you can contribute yourself:

Hold a ball collection drive

Place a collection box at your tennis facility

Donate your balls to Project Green Ball, if:

You are on a high school or college team and your season is over

You run a tennis program at a camp and the season has ended

You have hundreds of old balls in your hopper in your basement and canâ€™t bring yourself to throw them out

You are a tournament director (any level) and you have lots of balls left after your tourney â€“ we especially like the relationship between the Nice CÃ´te-dâ€™Azur Open and Operation Balle Jaune in which the balls from the tourney went straight to the FFT ball recycling program

You are a retailer and you want to be a collection point for Project Green Ball â€“ reach out to us and we can figure out a way to work together

Volunteer your time to help us manage the website, reach out to clubs, let people know about PGB, and discover new, innovative ways to recycle tennis balls

Donate money to help us defray the cost of collection boxes, shipping and to expand the program